Life

“We Do Triathlon For Life”

New Zealand’s Maori are taking to the sport for their health.

by Selwyn Parker

As the members of Maori triathlon club Taranaki Toa crossed the finish line at the Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain IRONMAN New Zealand in March, it was not only a personal triumph but also part of a campaign to help rebuild the native people’s health through the sport.

Each finisher was greeted by a big contingent of supporters, including club founder Alf Robson, who had been out on the course all day helping bring his members home. Remarkably, a few short years ago hardly any of them knew what a triathlon was, let alone an IRONMAN.

The Maori people usually make their name in team sports, especially in rugby and its 13-man version, rugby league, rather than individual ones. But a local tribe, or iwi, from the city of New Plymouth located about halfway down the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island is breaking the tradition. Alarmed at the deteriorating state of their people’s general health, several individuals launched Taranaki Toa in 2016 to try and reverse the trend.

One of the leading lights was Robson, a big-shouldered local who had been forced out of team sports through injury a dozen years ago. In the intervening years he’d done little to keep fit. "As my metabolism slowed, I packed on weight," he recalls. "It didn’t bother me being bigger initially because I’d never been able to put on weight. But over a period of ten years my weight ballooned from 87kg to 122kg." His doctor wanted to put him on medication, but Robson decided to try a different route. "I recognized I had allowed my health to slip away and I knew I had to do something about it. The deeper I looked, the more it became apparent that the health issues impacting me were commonplace among my people, New Zealand Maori."

The statistics were certainly dire. They showed that Maori adults in the region aged 25 years or older were 54 percent more likely than non-Maori to be hospitalized due to heart disease or stroke. As a consequence, life expectancy was also lower for Maori than non-Maori, the most common killers being cancer, diabetes and respiratory diseases. "Maori are massively over-represented in health statistics," Robson says. "I searched for a vehicle that might help reverse these alarming statistics," he says.

That vehicle became triathlon, and so Taranaki Toa was formed as a kind of safe haven for the whanau, or family, in which members could improve their hauora, or well-being. "I accepted that I couldn’t expect others to do something that I wasn’t prepared to try myself [but] I was overweight, I couldn’t swim, I’d never been a fan of running and I hadn’t ridden a bicycle since I left high school," says Robson.

With some local funding and a lot of community support, Taranaki Toa launched an inaugural triathlon series in 2017. It was a short event – 300m swim, 10km bike and 6km run – but long enough for triathlon newbies. There were no prizes, only the glory of crossing the finish line.

Since then, the Taranaki Toa club has achieved considerable local recognition in local radio and newspapers, and it has built up a strong Facebook following. It has also attracted members from the pakeha (white) community, including Steven and Sharee Carrie, who have spent their whole lives in the district. "They were friendly, sharing of things they’d learned, and encouraging," says Steven Carrie. Incidentally, like the iwi, he’s found that his own foray into triathlons has been good for his health, improving his diabetes and lowering his cholesterol. For good measure, both husband and wife have just registered for the 2020 IRONMAN New Zealand.

True to the founding principles, the members of Taranaki Toa look out for each other. When I joined some members recently for a Saturday morning ride, I was moved by the blessing in Maori before we set off. A kind of chant, it was a prayer for our safety and well-being. True to the spirit of the words, some of the stronger cyclists stayed back to keep an eye on the weaker ones (including myself).

While Taranaki Toa is all about "participation and completion rather than competition," as Robson puts it, the IRONMAN has become the ultimate challenge, and in the last five years more than 20 members have crossed the line in Taupo, including Robson, who has finished it twice. He’s justifiably proud of the club’s IRONMAN performances, but most of all, he’s proud of the improvement in the local iwi’s health, including his own.

"We do triathlon for life," he says simply.

Scotland-based Selwyn Parker is an award-winning journalist and author, a British age-group triathlon representative and multiple-time national champion.